Re: Nori

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham"
<richard.wordingham@...> wrote:

>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott" <BMScott@> wrote:
> >
> > At 3:53:38 PM on Saturday, September 13, 2008, Arnaud
> > Fournet wrote:
> >
> > > By the way, as you are talking about Germanic homeland,
> > > you can check in Starostin's databases the word "child",
> > > Yeniseian zi-l < g^il

And the final -d is from?

> > You won't find either form in his Yenisseian etymology
> > database at
> >
>

<http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/query.cgi?root=config&morpho=0&basename=\data\yenisey\yenet>.

>
> Or http://preview.tinyurl.com/574cgl to get directly to the entry,
> which I would have written as *Z1l if I, like Arnaud, had more
> confidence than Starostin in the vowel to reconstruct. (I'm afraid
> I didn't realise that 'i-' was meant to be a vowel symbol.) 'z^_l
> (vowel unclear)' is probably the best way to cite it. 'Vowel
> unclear' actually makes the etymology look less weak, for then one
> can include the possible Swedish and Danish cognates.

Erh, which? Pokorny has ON kundr "Sohn" and with þ ON a:s-kunnr "von
göttlicher Abkunft", but they have no descendants in Danish or Swedish
that I know of.

> If you insist on the vowel, all you have for Germanic cognates is
> Gothic _qilþei_ 'womb'. English _child_ is not a word for which
> one can confidently clain a Proto-Germanic origin.

But cf. pl. children, Du. kinderen, Germ. Kinder. That plural ending
which is taken by very few German and even fewer Dutch neuters and
very few Ferman masc.'s make it an old s-stem, I learnt somewhere. In
English it's even rarer, which makes one wonder if they are cognate
somehow, the DU./Germ. ones stemming from *g^en- "erzeugen"?

One thing that puzzled me was
Dutch knippen "clip" and ON hnippa "thrust, stab" (Da. nippe "pinch,
nibble"). The kn-/hn- double form points to loan from NWB and
'true-Gmc.' (or adapted loan from NWB?), respectively, but was there a
kn- > kl- change somewhere locally, to avoid the non-IE(?) kn-? None
of them have proper PIE pedigrees. Perhaps kn- > kl- was generalized
to -n- > -l- in the case of Eng. child.


Torsten